Original subtitles

He's an actor. Is this an invite to a necktie party, Reverend? A friend of mine

once said, if you don't like John Wayne, you're wrong. A legend. That'll be the

day. Wayne just seemed indestructible, and in most pictures he was. And an

embodiment of America itself. Out here do processes up bullet. Anyone would like to

be as badass and tough-minded as Wayne was on screen. But John Wayne spent much

of his life quietly tormented, desperately trying to measure up to the

towering Hollywood persona he had crafted. What brings back the age-old

laundry can a very good man have tragic deficiencies? Wayne's life is rocky from

the start, with a father who's prone to failure and a mother who's far from

adoring. And I think the anger came from his childhood and his adolescence,

because it was a very rough time. Desperate to escape the poverty he grew

up in, Wayne turns to acting. But as he creates his iconic Hollywood persona,

Wayne finds he can't always live up to his own ideals. I think he was

embarrassed that he didn't fight in World War II. Duke Morrison wasn't as

invincible as John Wayne was on screen. While he plays men who always do the

right thing on camera, his real life is far more complicated. And she drank. A

lot. And that eventually is what broke up the marriage. Over nearly five decades in

the film business, Wayne experiences Hollywood's highest highs. John Wayne in

Studio. And its lowest lows. When we were making the shoot, there was kind of a

sense this could be his last move. Wayne's outspoken political views

eventually torpedo his box office power and threaten to permanently tarnish his

legacy decades later. He made a lot of trouble for himself because he refused to

put a cork in it. But through it all, Wayne uses his experiences to invent a

heroic character that he and an entire generation of filmgoers aspires to be.

Something about him rang the American way to people. John Wayne could set your

moral compass. It wasn't mythic. It was real. But it was mythic. The End In 1976,

veteran television actor and future director Ron Howard comes to a Carson

City, Nevada hotel where a door swings open and he stands face to face with a

giant. It's John Wayne except he doesn't have his hairpiece on. So he's a giant

bald man. And he looks down kind of at me. I mean, he's much taller. I'm 5'9".

Much taller than I am. He said, oh, okay, good to meet you. And he sticks his hand

out. My hand just disappears in his, you know, paw. At the time, Wayne is

struggling with his health and Howard is there to act alongside him in what will

be the last of his nearly 200 movies, The Shootest. How could you get into so many

fights and then always come out on top? Well, I nearly tied you, shooting.

Friend, there's nobody up there shooting back at you. When they meet, Howard has

just been featured on the cover of TV Guide for his role on Happy Days and the

director of The Shootest, Hans Wayne, a copy. John Wayne looks at it, puts his

glasses on, looks at it again, looks at me, adjusts his glasses, looks at it

again. And then in the perfect John Wayne drawl, he says, ah, big shot, huh? And I

thought, oh, man, I am screwed. It's a quintessential John Wayne moment come to

life. But during the filming of The Shootest, Howard begins to truly

understand something many others already know. John Wayne isn't really John Wayne.

I had no sense that this was a guy who would ever want to be solving problems

with violence. John Wayne was a creation. It was his creation. It's not who he was.

He was a kind, caring individual who loved his friends and family and tried to

make the right decisions throughout life. Yet that larger-than-life persona he

crafted for himself created an impossibly high bar for John Wayne to live up to. He

spent his legendary career feeling tormented by fears of not measuring up.

No matter how high he climbed. He's got something roiling under the surface. Got

loaded a lot. I'm sure he had some demons. He told me I was strong as an ox.

Or even an ox died. The star's often difficult road begins far from the

shining lights of Hollywood in Winterset, Iowa. There, in 1907, the man who will

one day be known as John Wayne is born into poverty as Marion Robert Morrison,

the 13-pound firstborn son of Mary and Clyde Morrison. They live in a small

house. It's a tiny little clabbered shack, basically one room. His childhood

was difficult. His father was working as a pharmacist's assistant and often as a

pharmacist, even though he seemed not to have been licensed. Clyde Morrison could

not support his family. He couldn't make enough money to buy a house. They were

constantly moving around from one cheap rental to another. Despite the family's

ever-present financial troubles, in 1912, the Morissons welcome a second son.

Marion's mother dotes upon the boy as her obvious favorite, even harshly stealing

Marion's middle name and bestowing it upon his younger sibling. They simply

decided to call the newly arrived child Robert Morrison. So they yanked Robert

away from Marion's name. This isn't the only name-related trouble that the future

actor faces. The man who comes to define American masculinity is cursed by a

rather unmanly name. Part of his John Wayne rhino skin might have been

developed fighting people who are teasing him in the 30s and 20s for being named

Marion. That's a teasable name. Perhaps to avoid this taunting, Morrison adopts a

much more rugged first name that he borrows from the family's dog, Duke. It

sounds like one of those legendary stories that has no credence, but there

are pictures of Duke the dog with Duke the boy. And of course, Duke was happy to

be called absolutely anything but Marion. While playing second fiddle to his

younger brother and dealing with the struggles of growing up as Marion, the

troubled boy also has to deal with a major upheaval. At just seven years old,

he and his family follow many other Iowans west to California. They went to

Mojave, Lancaster. I don't know if you've been to Lancaster lately, but there's not

much there in 1914. Living in what the actor will later call a glorified shack,

the family finds that California is no promised land. They moved out to right on

the edge of the Mojave Desert in California where Clyde Morrison got the

harebrained idea of raising crops in spite of the fact that it was 120 degrees

in the summer. And they didn't have enough volume of water to counteract the

extraordinary heat. After Clyde's desert farming venture ends in yet another

failure, the family moves in 1916 to Glendale, a Los Angeles suburb not far

from Hollywood. There, the Morrison's troubles continue. His parents divorced,

which very few parents did in that era. So it was a fairly ranker situation.

Marion went with his father. His brother, Robert, went with their mother, which

kind of alienated his mother. Duke's bleak home life provides him few examples

of how to fight life's battles and come out on top. For that, he needs to buy a

ticket. Movies were an important part of his growing up because it was the era of

great action stars. His heroes were Tom Mix, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. He also loved

Harry Carey, a cowboy star of that period, who was making movies with John

Ford. Filing away those silver screen pointers on what it means to be a man,

Duke begins to build an identity separate from his family, working hard to show

he's intelligent, likeable, and bound for better things. He finds solace in school,

friends, and ends up going to high school in Glendale where he's on the debate

team, on the dance committee, writes for the school newspaper, in the drama club.

A lean and mean guard, Duke finds his most likely ticket to a better life on

the football field. Six foot four, lanky, but with a strong physique, a natural

born athlete. He became a big man on campus and a star on the Glendale High

football team. His dreams of rising above his station in life are given a huge

boost when Wayne earns a scholarship to play for the University of Southern

California, where he studies pre-law. The only reason he was going to USC was the

football scholarship. They never could have afforded the tuition. But at the

start of his junior year, Duke's chance of becoming a legend on the gridiron is

ruined when he injures his shoulder. The incident ends his football dreams, leads

to the loss of his scholarship, and causes him to drop out of USC. It surely

feels to Duke like he's never actually going to escape the dismal life he knew

all too well growing up. No one took him seriously at USC. He was just under

football player. He had to drop out because there was no money. It was

embarrassing. That social dislocation that he experienced for 20 years in his

life, I think he used it as fuel. In need of money, Duke lands a job at Fox

Studios. He then embarks on a new path that will alter his life and American

culture itself. Today, at the John Wayne and American Experience exhibit in Fort

Worth, Texas, his son Ethan shows off memorabilia from his father's early days

on set. So this is from the 1929-1930 season at Fox Studios, and he's a prop

man's assistant. And this is his union card, and it says, Duke Morrison. He

still had that till the day he died, and that card was the beginning of John

Wayne. It touched me because he saved it. At the studio, absolutely no job is too

small for the hardworking future megastar, who is making just $35 a week.

He did everything that was asked of him. He was a grip. He did stunts. He loved

camera boxes, whatever needed to be done, he did. He wasn't resting on his laurels

because he didn't have any laurels. It's here Duke learns the mechanics of

filmmaking, but he also discovers something he's never had before,

something that he will treasure all his career, a home. All the stars I ever knew

would go to the trailer after every shot. He never left the set. He stayed and

watched. He liked to watch the whole thing happen. And he liked the idea and

the feeling of an extended family, because his own family life was so

difficult and unsatisfying to him. Among his new family, Duke first works as

little more than a strong back, but some deeply unfulfilled part of him yearns for

greater recognition. The kind that can only come from stepping into the

limelight, something Duke claims he's reluctant to do. Acting was not something

overtly masculine men would cop to as being a profession that they wanted to go

into. So Wayne would tell people, oh, it was an accident. No, it wasn't an

accident. He was hungry to be an actor. Though he starts off playing only bit

roles, Duke's big break comes in a 1930 pioneer epic when director Raul Walsh

hires no-name actors to cut costs. He liked the way Duke walked. He saw him

walking at the studio at Fox, and he could put him in the lead in a picture

called The Big Trail. Everything a Madurean park could trade. Two snow

-capped mountain ranges would be lost in the sky. As Duke prepares for a role that

could forever alter his career, he learns there's one big change he must first

undergo. Duke Morrison was a stuntman's name, not an actor's name, so he had to

come up with something else. So the studio came up with John Wayne, which he

liked. The John and the Wayne kind of fit together like blocks of granite. It was

that name, John Wayne, that would appear in ads that build The Big Trail as the

most important picture ever produced. Not long after leaving his troubled boyhood

home, Wayne seems on the cusp of stardom. But The Big Trail is a box office

failure, and he's sent down to the Bush Leagues of Hollywood. Year after year,

Wayne acts in low-budget films and serials, refining his skills as an actor

by playing everything from a trucker to a newsreel cameraman to a hockey player.

But he naturally gravitates toward one genre, the Western. How long are you

going to stand for? How are you going to stop it? I'll tell you how. Westerns were

the big thing in the 20th century. Most of them were about finding law and order

in the West. It was very American. The Western is the foundation myth of

America. It didn't imitate anything coming from any other culture. It was

utterly American, this pioneer idea. Westerns also served another important

role for movie audiences. They were fun. They were the action flicks. Back then it

was the bad guys and the good guys, and the bad guy won initially against the

good guy, and then the good guy eventually did in the bad guy and got the

dang. Like the small town sheriffs who suffer an initial defeat in these films,

Wayne isn't about to give up his fight just because his first big movie was a

flop. Besides, he can't. In 1933, the former boy who was desperate not to

repeat his father's struggles, marries Josephine Josie Sines, the daughter of a

well-to-do Latin American diplomat. She came from a upscale family that was far

above the Morrison's in terms of relative social strata. He got married and very

soon had four children. He took what work he could get. He did Westerns in five

days. He did serials in four weeks. He got 750 bucks. Not for a week. He got 750

bucks for the whole serial. But it was the pit of the depression, and he had a

family to support, so he did whatever he had to do. Wayne has been building his

credentials in B-movie Westerns, but will he be able to escape a paycheck-to

-paycheck existence and give his family what eluded him, all while his country is

on the brink of war? There are members of the Wayne family that believe that he

felt guilty about this all of his life. Passed over by his own mother and

terrified of replicating his father's constant failures, John Wayne turns to

Hollywood, desperately seeking the success and validation his early life

lacked. Needing to support his high-class wife's expensive tastes and a growing

family, the young actor trudges through a long series of forgettable B-movies.

Throughout the 1930s, he builds an audience, develops as an actor, and

forges one of the most important relationships of his life with director

John Ford. John Ford is arguably the best American director. Hard to make a Western

without thinking of Jack Ford. The lifelong bond between Wayne and John Ford

began back in 1926 on the set of Ford's silent picture, Mother McCree, where the

young USC athlete worked herding geese for a scene. Ford came up to Wayne and

said, I hear you're a football player. He said, well, let me see you get down at

three-point stance. You got down at three -point stance, and Ford kicked his arm out

from under, but he went face down in the dirt. And he was in the same six, which

was essentially the entire relationship in miniature. Despite their rocky

meeting, he's drawn to Ford's take no prisoners approach, an attitude that

Wayne will eventually shape his entire professional persona around. I think

Wayne was looking for a father substitute, because his own father, who

he adored, was not successful as the world-defined success. When Wayneraz met

John Ford, he met a man who controlled his environment. The two grow incredibly

close, but Ford's brutal treatment of Wayne feeds the insecurities the actor

already wrestles with. He berated Wayne mercilessly on sets for 30 years. Wayne

would pull off some extraordinarily difficult scene in one or two takes, and

Ford would grump, oh, okay, let's print it. He's not going to be able to do it

any better. But when people were standing on the set, they would be stunned at the

way Ford would talk to Wayne, and Wayne always took it. Duke always sidled up for

it, and I think he knew he deserved some. In his mind, at least, thought some

punishment. Ford was perfect for him. I'll take that chance. By the late 1930s,

Wayne has spent nearly a third of his life earning a buck by playing throwaway

roles in lackluster films. It's hardly gained him the respectability he so badly

wants. And Wayne finally gets Ford, whom he calls Pappy, to help him secure a spot

as a serious leading man. In 1939, Ford finally used him in a picture, and it was

stagecoach. I think pre-1930s, he was not the idol of young men, but his career was

idling like a young man. And then stagecoach, that moment, the hero moment.

Hold it! And Ford's a genius for that. Duke's up front, he cocks that gun, and

you go, well, there's the guy, you know, there's the hero. Hello, kid. Hello,

Curly. Hi, a buck. Which made Wayne a star, and put him in respectable

pictures, as opposed to the cheapies he'd been making for many years. Beginning in

1939, he basically doesn't step a foot wrong, because he was a young, masculine,

athletic, leading man. And he could act better than people thought he could. He

could exceed their expectations as an actor. After stagecoach, Wayne no longer

views success as some distant dream. But far from Hollywood, world events begin to

threaten all he's built. The war breaks out in December 1941 for America. Wayne

is 34 years old at this point. He's got four kids, married with four kids. He had

good friends that simply put their careers into cold storage, and their

families had to make do with whatever money was in the bank, and they went off

to war. Wayne spins the war state side, where he makes 13 films, many of which

extol the virtue of service. Wayne's public logic is that he can best serve

his country by celebrating the war efforts on the big screen. But in

private, his feelings are far more complicated. I bet he was haunted too in

a way. He's doing films about guys who are willing to get off, and he's nowhere

near that. And I always thought, what an odd abyss for him to straddle. I think he

was sort of embarrassed that he didn't fight in World War II, but he certainly

led the charge in movies. Ford made probably the greatest American war film

of the Second World War. They were expendable, it's called, and Wayne is in

that. He's very good at it too. Home is a sailor. Home from the sea. And the

hunter, home from the hill. While Wayne's wartime films provide a positive morale

boost for America, they create a firestorm of inner turmoil and guilt that

will forever plague Wayne. I think the war probably caused him feelings of

discomfort that he felt that he didn't look up to his own ideals perhaps. And

I'm sure somewhere in the back of his mind at three in the morning that

occurred to him. Because he was too honest with himself as a person to not

have it occur. I do have a moment through most of John Wayne's films where I think,

oh, I bet he had an extra pack of cigarettes that day, or threw down an

extra tumbler that night, because this has got to haunt him. I think he probably

had some survivors remorse in an odd way. There are members of the Wayne family

that believe that he felt guilty about this all of his life, and that that's

possibly one of the reasons he became such a chest-beating super-patriot. After

the conflicts end, Wayne begins to focus on crafting his trademark role, a man who

never backs down from a challenge. The first picture that he made that sort of

epitomized the character that he ended up playing a lot was Red River, Hawks is Red

River. He's very, very John Wayne in that. I'm gonna hang ya. I'm gonna hang

ya? No. No you're not. What? Red River said, and this is the first time you say

that's John Wayne. After more than a decade and a half in Hollywood, the man

once known as Duke Morrison is starting to fully inhabit the greatest character

he will ever play, John Wayne. He created this guy that everyone would like to try

to be tough, fair, honest, not perfect, but always improving. He might be flawed,

and he might be dark at times, but he always tried to make the right decision.

He might have to be mean, or he could be mean, but he was never small or petty.

Wayne could play savage if he had to, and you believed him, because he had that

residue of anger. And I think the anger came from his childhood and his

adolescence, because it was a very rough time. I think that's part of what fueled

his indignation that could come out in his acting and give it such vitality and

virulence and violence. Yeah, it's bigger than life in a way, but also very

grounded, grounded enough that you could believe in it. It wasn't mythic. It was

real, but it was mythic. John Wayne may be the hero America desperately needs,

but his family man status is in serious jeopardy when his on-screen romance turns

into an off-screen affair with a legendary Hollywood sex pot. Wayne came

home to find all his clothes piled on the front lawn. As John Wayne becomes one of

Hollywood's top leading men, his star shines brighter than ever. You know, the

fans were very important to him. He knew that without them, he didn't have his

life. So as a little boy, I had to always have his autograph cards in my pocket,

and I'd have to watch him, and when he'd need a new stack, I would have to put

that new stack in his hand. But Wayne's not just a fan favorite. Critics say he's

becoming a symbol of America itself. He incrementally defined himself as a kind

of avatar of American masculinity, as mid -century America wanted to think of

American masculinity. He was the whole package, you know? Women wanted to be

with him, men wanted to be like him. Yet the weight of that perfect persona is

often crushing Wayne. The bigger he becomes on screen, the more he grapples

with feeling like an imposter due to his childhood psychological scars. What

brings back the age-old laundry can a very good man have tragic deficiencies.

While his popularity skyrockets, those deficiencies are put on display when it

comes to Wayne's role as a husband to his wealthy socialite wife, Josie. She was

devoutly Catholic, and she was very beautiful and smart. Her Catholicism, he

found slightly claustrophobic, and he gradually grew away from her because she

didn't want any more children, and his access to her was lessened. Wayne's

marriage to Josie may be crumbling, but he doesn't lack the attention of women

and embarks on a series of affairs. His most famous is with actress and co-star

Marlene Dietrich, who allegedly spotted Wayne at a studio commissary and told a

director, Daddy, buy me that. From now on, things are going to be around my way,

and you can start adjusting yourself to that idea. And that was a serious thing,

as serious as you could be with Marlene Dietrich. She didn't know the meaning of

monogamy, let alone how to spell it. For Wayne's wife, his blatant infidelity is

too much. Wayne came home to find all of his clothes piled in the front lawn. That

was pretty much the end of the marriage. He had a lot of bad feelings about the

divorce. He felt guilty about the divorce, and he never engaged in that

kind of wholesale behavior again. He kept his nose very clean. But his problems

with women don't end with his first marriage. Just months after his divorce

from Josie, he marries Esperanza Chata Bauer. The marriage to Josie was too

staked for him and too refined. So he went completely in the opposite

direction, married a kind of wild woman, and he couldn't control her. And Wayne

was a drinker, but he was never an alcoholic. He was a workaholic, and she

drank a lot. A lot. And that eventually is what broke up the marriage, because

she became a really hardcore alcoholic. Having clawed his way out of poverty,

Wayne is driven by his need for success, and by his deep-seated fear of failure.

Lauren Bacall said one of the most charming things about Wayne was how ill

it is he was. At times it made him look very attractive. When things get rough at

home, Wayne turns to the one place he feels most at ease, a film set. I feel

like he was super happy when he was engaged in a project. So when they're

making a film, he was happy. Even though home was a nice, nice town to live in, he

had to deal with the administration of life there. He was always happier on

location. He hated to be alone. He liked to be around people. He liked the

feedback. He liked the conversation. He liked the buzz. One movie that garners

plenty of buzz for Wayne is John Ford's The Searchers, recognized by many critics

as the best Western ever made. Hi, it's your uncle. I still think of some of

those images from The Searchers. The hat he wore, the shirt, the color of the

shirt, the walk. It was John Wayne at his most iconic, but also I thought sort of

most authentic. In the 1956 epic, Wayne, who will later endure criticism for his

own controversial views, plays Ethan Edwards, a former Confederate soldier on

an unending quest to find a niece who's been kidnapped by Comanche Indians. Ethan

Edwards and The Searchers is a hardcore racist and unreconstructed Confederate

bigot. Figure a man's only good for one oath at a time. I took mine to the

Confederate States of America. And really has no redeeming social value at all,

except he's the hero. And the reason he's the hero is because any sane man would

stop the quest for that child after a couple months, and Ethan keeps going for

years. I hope you die. That'll be the day. A man driven to finish the job he

started no matter the cost, Ethan Edwards is a character Wayne can relate to. And

when his third wife, Pilar Pallette, bears him a son, they name the baby after

the hero of The Searchers. John Ford did a magnificent job directing it, and John

Wayne did a magnificent job in the film. That's where my name came from. Just like

the character, Wayne seems to be on a never-ending personal quest to prove

himself and conquer his gnawing self -doubt. He's already shown he's a

formidable actor, but now he wants to direct. In 1960, he sinks loads of his

own money into the Alamo. He said he's going to make a movie called The Alamo,

and would I be interested in coming to Texas and working with him? I said, well,

sure, I would love to go to Texas and work for you. Wayne's coworkers

consistently see their respect for the man grow and grow on set, even when his

tortured side starts to show. Well, the stuntmen all love John Wayne. They love

working with him. He wouldn't ask you to do anything. He wouldn't do himself. He

just made it damn rough on everybody. Everybody had to pay attention. He was an

unreal son of a... Despite his tremendous efforts, Wayne's directorial debut is a

flop. It was a film he desperately had been trying to make for more than ten

years, but Wayne wanted to direct it himself. And he'd never directed anything

before. And because he was so desperate to make the movie, he made a series of

very bad financial deals. So it wiped him out, basically financially. After decades

of running from the failures of his father and painstakingly crafting a new

identity, it looks like everything's about to come crashing down. Will Wayne

be able to undo the disaster of his passion project? Duke Morrison, you know,

wasn't as invincible as John Wayne was on screen. After John Wayne's artistic and

financial failure with the Alamo, the aging star desperately needs a win. So he

returns to doing what he does best, playing a part that will win over

audiences and for the first time in his career, wow, critics. John Wayne really

wasn't taken seriously until very late in his career, with TrueGrit. In the 1969

film, Wayne plays Rooster Cogburn, a drunk misanthrope who helps a young girl

find the man who killed her father. The role earns Wayne his first and only Best

Actor Oscar at the Academy Awards in 1970. The winner is John Wayne in

TrueGrit. But son Ethan says that the man he knows at home is not the same guy who

accepts the Oscar that night. I didn't come to John Wayne through the screen. He

was my father. At home, I was able to see the difference between the man that was

my father and the guy that he played on screen. Duke Morrison wasn't as

invincible as John Wayne was on screen, and he had family issues, marital issues,

sometimes poor business management. Already consumed with trying to measure

up to his epic reputation, Wayne also faces constant battles in his personal

life. His third marriage to Pilar also falls apart. I think they were happy for

a while, for five or ten years. After that, they weren't so happy. Ultimately,

the marriage broke up. They were separated, legally separated, but never

divorced. With the pressures of stardom mounting and continued failures at home,

John Wayne is a man in desperate need of an escape. A Southern California boy, the

actor loves spending time with friends on the water. But when you're the symbol of

American masculinity, a mere sailboat simply won't do. In need of something as

big and bad as the man he plays on screen, Wayne finds a home away from home

on a ship he christened, the Wild Goose. It was a 136-foot converted World War II

minesweeper. The place where he could relax. You know, because the rest of the

time when he's around people, he's got to take care of John Wayne. And when he gets

on the boat, he can finally relax and be Duke Morrison. He pulled a heavy cart

through life, and that boat gave him a place to relax and unwind. But the Wild

Goose isn't the only place where those close to him get to see the real John

Wayne. My fondest memory of my father would be when he could get a break on set

and we could hop on a couple horses and go for a little ride and get that half an

hour or 40 minutes of time together with nobody else around doing something that

we both enjoyed doing. It's probably the most special memory that I have of the

man and my time with him. Far from the shoot first, ask questions later

character he plays on the screen, those who know him say Wayne is a man of great

intellect. He's a history buff, a collector of Native American art, and an

avid chess player. Something Ron Howard gets to know when they work together. I

remember thinking, he plays chess just the way he does everything else. It's

direct, it's attack, it's lean forward. It was full throttle and it had nothing

to do with a movie, but it had everything to do with him. He's a learned man and a

very, very intelligent individual. People expected John Wayne to be just like John

Wayne, and he wasn't. As a person he was much less belligerent than the John Wayne

character. He was more thoughtful. From his earliest days in California, Wayne is

a staunch conservative. Believe me that Duke Wayne was very often at political

gatherings and so forth, and most supportive of me, and I was very grateful

to him for it. Having risen to the top of Hollywood, Wayne isn't the least bit

afraid to speak his mind. I think he thought it was his right as a citizen to

say what he thought, and if they like it, fine. And if they don't like it, fine.

They don't have to go to my movies. After sitting out World War II, Wayne spent

decades not only lugging around guilt, but also taking open criticism for that

decision from his frequent director, John Ford, who did join the war effort. Ford

never let him forget it. He was after him all the time. While you were acting, we

were in the middle of a war. I think it fulfilled a self-flagellative need in

John Wayne. You probably thought, yeah, I deserved that. So in the 1960s, Wayne

doesn't hesitate to make The Green Berets, a propagandistic nod to the

righteousness of the war in Vietnam. Nobody under the age of 25 would go see a

John Wayne movie after The Green Berets and after his public support for the

Vietnam War. I think that's actually one of the reasons the latter portions of his

career, his box office, is actually in decline because of his outspoken

political sympathies. Those political sympathies are on full display in a no

-holds-barred 1971 Playboy magazine interview. In it, Wayne makes some

eyebrow-raising statements that will come back to haunt him. He was not a perfect

man. He knew he wasn't a perfect man. He didn't pretend to be a perfect man. He

knew he was flawed. He played deeply flawed men. He made a lot of trouble for

himself because he refused to put a cork in it, even when he said things that

people got really upset about. When his controversial comments resurface and go

viral in 2019, John Wayne's legacy is in peril. Can it withstand being examined

through a decidedly less forgiving modern lens? The exhibit dedicated to John Wayne

is now being removed in response to student protests. Some students have been

pushing since last fall to remove the exhibit due to Wayne's history of racist

comments. Well, they just need to understand him. If they understood him,

they wouldn't want to cancel him. I don't know, and I've never crossed paths with

anybody who knew my father and didn't love him. He was as worldly as anybody in

existence. But some fans today actually consider Wayne's blunt talk about

controversial topics to be part of his appeal, while others say he should be

remembered for only one thing. Some very good performances and some very good

pictures. And as far as the political stuff, I don't give a shit about that. I

don't want to hear about it. Little does Wayne know that backlash from his red-hot

public opinions is far from the biggest hurdle he will have to face. When we were

making the shoot, there was kind of a sense that this could be his last move.

By the time the 1970s roll around, John Wayne is still busy being John Wayne.

Knock, knock. I wouldn't. Action stars including Steve McQueen, Sylvester

Stallone, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris and Arnold Schwarzenegger have paid homage to

Wayne's influence on their careers. But it's Branigan, clearly inspired by Dirty

Harry, that best showcases what these shoot-em-up stars borrow from the icon.

Remember going to see Branigan and he made me laugh when he blows the front

door off the hinges and says, knock, knock. Knock, knock. That was an Arnold

film before Arnold came along. Knock, knock. Even as he tries his hand as a

tough modern-day crime fighter, Duke Morrison remains true to his western

roots. In 1971, he stars as the title character in Big Jake, along with his son

Ethan, who places grandson Little Jake. You heard? No, I'm scared. So am I. But

don't let them know it. Well, for me, Big Jake was amazing because I got more time

on set and with him, so I loved it. While on set for Big Jake, Ethan gets to see

that, after decades in Hollywood, his father is the one in charge. I don't care

who was producing or who was directing, they were John Wayne movies. And so he

had, you know, a hand in most of what happened on the set. He was used to

working a certain way and so he might say, just put the camera there, put the

light there and turn the damn thing on. Like, let's get on with it. He could work

faster than a lot of people. Take off your glasses. My what? Your goggles. But

Wayne's days of hustling as one of Hollywood's hardest-working actors can't

last forever. My father was a smoker. My father smoked unfiltered camels and he

basically used one match a day and he'd light the next one off the last

cigarette. In 1964, Wayne beats a first battle with lung cancer, then uses the

same voice that's often landed him in hot water to try to make a difference. So why

don't all of you do yourselves a favor? Get a checkup. Talk someone you like into

getting a checkup. Nag someone you love into getting a checkup. They told him to

be quiet, not to tell anybody, would kill his career. He went the opposite

direction. He said, no, you know, if I can go out and tell my story and some

other guy who's been avoiding a checkup goes and gets it. His life could be

saved. On screen, Wayne has made a career of putting his enemies in their place.

But in the 1970s, he finds that when dealing with cancer, he's up against an

unstoppable force. The first bout he had with cancer was one thing, but the second

one really was rough. In his last film, The Shootest, Wayne plays an aging

gunfighter who is also fighting the dreaded disease. His young co-star

develops a whole new perspective on the Hollywood icon during the shoot. I knew a

lot about John Wayne. We got along right away. There just was something that

clicked. He was very welcoming. I didn't necessarily think he was a great, great

actor, but I thought of Wayne as a fantastic movie star. As I began to work

with him, I gained a tremendous amount of respect acting with John Wayne. Look out!

But Howard also witnesses Wayne's declining health firsthand. When we were

making The Shootest, there was kind of a sense this could be his last movie. And

he had his moments of struggling where he just needed to sit down, collect his

breath, and carry on. But his ambition was to do more. It's this ambition that

carried Wayne since his earliest days as Duke Morrison, and will be with him when

he finally succumbs to cancer in 1979. It was front page news all over the world

today. John Wayne was dead. President Carter paid tribute to him as the genuine

article in an Age of Few Heroes. When the final credits roll in his life, he's

listed on his death certificate as Marion Morrison, aka John Wayne. I think he

always thought of himself as Duke Morrison. John Wayne was the name that he

worked under, but I think he thought of himself as Duke Morrison. He never

changed his name. If he liked you, he'd say, call me Duke. That's part of what I

dig about it. I know it's a creation. That creation gave Wayne endless

opportunity and an endless burden to carry. But even in death, Wayne's

fighting spirit continues. As a family, we established the John Wayne Cancer

Foundation. It worked around 100,000 people a year who were getting cutting

edge treatment and surgery because of John Wayne. Because when he was dying, he

said, use my name to help these doctors fight cancer. Duke Morrison may be gone,

but John Wayne will live forever. John Wayne's legacy is creating a coherent,

idealized vision of American masculinity. You can bounce up against it, you can

criticize it, you can alter it and object to it, but you can't deny it. Anyone

would like to be as badass and tough -minded and as tough physically as Wayne

was on screen. He brought strength and virtue to sort of making the hard

decisions and doing what had to be done in a very accessible, exhilarating, rough

and tumble way with no compromise. John Wayne was aspirational. John Wayne could

set your moral compass. You could watch that and go, that's a tough decision, but

it's the right decision. And if you don't make that decision, you'll pay for it for

the rest of your life because you'll be disappointed in yourself.